Surveillance Law (Stanford MOOC, Fall 2014) – This website hosts content for Surveillance Law , a free online course offered by Stanford Law School . We encourage you to join the interactive course on Coursera. If you would like heightened privacy protection, you can view noninteractive material on this website. The server is configured to not log requests, and can be accessed using HTTPS ( details ) or as a Tor hidden service (7vrl523532rjjznj.onion ). It’s easy to be cynical about government surveillance. In recent years, a parade of Orwellian disclosures have been making headlines. The FBI, for example, is hacking into computers that run anonymizing software. The NSA is vacuuming up domestic phone records. Even local police departments are getting in on the act, tracking cellphone location history and intercepting signals in realtime. Perhaps 2014 is not quite 1984, though. This course explores how American law facilitates electronic surveillance-but also substantially constrains it. You will learn the legal procedures that police and intelligence agencies have at their disposal, as well as the security and privacy safeguards built into those procedures. The material also provides brief, not-too-geeky technical explanations of some common surveillance methods.

 

Provided by MIRLN.

 

Note from MIRLN founder Vince Polley:

Polley : I love how they’re using TOR, and giving out .onion addresses.

 

Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net/stoonn